We shouldn't be asking if Viktor Gyökeres is good

We should be asking instead, what is the right amount of Gyökeres that helps Arsenal.

It doesn't seem like you can go very long in a conversation about Arsenal without it turning to Viktor Gyökeres. He is a polarizing figure, to put it nicely.

His supporters will point to his 21 total goals scored last season, his impressive on/off numbers, and that he was a true “9” in a mold that Arsenal have lacked for years. His detractors will counter with his more middling non-penalty goal tally, his lack of technical security, and the missing impact against better teams.

This is unfortunately a situation where both sides here seem pretty dug in and are talking past each other. My own perspective is that they both make good points about him and they are describing an above average but flawed/limited player. The disagreement on Gyökeres at Arsenal hinges much more on how much of him the team needs rather than the simple binary of is he good or bad.

Season 1 - Met Expectations, but it was a low bar

Coming into last season I set benchmarks for what I expected from him, built from his Champions League output and an adjusted-down version of his Portuguese league numbers, mixed with what I thought a viable Arsenal striker needed to produce. Because he's a striker who provides most of his value around the box, I focused on shots and goals: 2.7 shots and 0.45 goals per 90 in the Premier League.

Here is how things ended up over the course of the season:

He never got the same shot volume that he had previously and didn’t hit the number I had set for him. At Sporting he had 3.9 and 3.1 shots per 90 in his last two seasons (Domestic + Europe) before he moved to Arsenal.

For goal scoring he did better, landing right where I'd set it (0.43 vs 0.45). His shot volume dropped but he compensated for that with an increase in his average shot quality.

My expectation for his overall game and contributions outside of the box were pretty low and watching him week in and week out didn’t change that.

I do think that his hold up/outlet play improved as the season went on but it went from yikes that is bad more to something closer to average. I don’t think that he made enough impact, even when the team played more towards his strengths, and that when he was going up against significantly stronger defenders every week, he looked much more ordinary than when he played in Portugal.

Was it good enough?

So he hit my expectations. But that's a separate, and less important, question than whether hitting them was good enough.

The answer to this rests largely on how big of a role that you want him to have. If you want him to be the primary starter for a team that is competing for the Premier League title and trying to win a Champions League, probably not. If you think or want him to be more of a rotation and secondary option for this level of team, you are probably more content with that.

Last season he ended up tied for 8th in non-penalty goals in the Premier League. That’s quite good for a player that isn’t your number one attacking threat but would be quite disappointing if he was.

On a per 90 basis he lands in roughly the same spot, finishing 9th in the Premier League.

Looking at his season in a more Arsenal-specific context, the verdict again points closer to, “eh, it was fine” than anything else. Since Mikel Arteta became the manager at Arsenal, just six players have bettered his 11 non-penalty goals from last season. Here is the full list of the goal scoring leaders since the 2019/20 season.

If you want the binary, massive success or massive failure, his numbers from last season unfortunately aren’t going to give it to you. His season won't be memorialized as anything great or historic. But he scored 11 non-penalty goals that made a meaningful contribution to a title win.

Four of them broke a deadlock, and another two pushed a one-goal lead to two.

What should we want and expect for the coming season?

Last season probably wasn't the plan the club had when they signed him. I don't think he was bought to be a backup, but I don't think he was bought to be the every-match starter either. My expectation, and how things played out when he was fit, was that Kai Havertz would still take a big share of the striker minutes.

Gyökeres was thrown into the starting role from matchweek 1 and he was often the only option, with injuries limiting the alternatives. That made adapting to a new league harder, and he had his own injury absence to work through as well.

He ended up playing a bit more than two thirds of available Premier League and Champions League minutes, and closer to three quarters of the minutes he was fit for. Having watched a season of it, that is more than this squad should be asking of him.

There have been rumors of a move to Spain, and that's something Arsenal should be open to. There's no need for a fire sale, but if an offer came in that got their fee back, that would make sense for everyone.

If he stays, my expectation, barring another injury hit year to Havertz, is that he plays materially less than he did in 2025/26. His role and squad position would be closer to the original plan but maybe even limited to certain matchups. When I have been imagining the squad usage this season, I have penciled him in for him for something around 30-50% of available minutes rather than the 73% he had last season. He can still make an impact.

There will be matches that suit his strengths. He is one of the very few players in this squad who will stretch a defense and operate as a low-touch, off-the-ball attacker, and that's a thing Arsenal genuinely need. If things go more to plan, there should be fewer matches where he looks like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. The opposition matchup and the talent around him can and should be better matched to produce better outcomes.

No one will mistake him for a super star, but if he is playing less than half of Arsenal’s minutes and producing at the level that he did last season, more people will be content with him. If he is playing primarily against the right opponents and as a way to keep other attackers fresh, that is a way that he can still produce value to Arsenal.

Correction: 2026-08-18 - The previous version of this post gave him credit for just 1 goal that helped Arsenal go from +1 game state to a +2, it was actually 2 times. This happened vs Nottingham Forest and against Sunderland. I regret this error and the text above has been corrected.